Resetting the Compass: Australia's Journey Towards Sustainability

By David D. Yencken and Debra D. Wilkinson

Resetting the Compass: Australia's Journey Towards Sustainability Updated Edition sets out Australia's environmental problems in their global context and explains what is now needed to fix them. It also illustrates how ecological sustainability can be achieved together with economic, social and cultural sustainability.

The book examines the pressures on our environment from population growth, consumption patterns and technological change. The specific actions needed to deal with each of the problems identified are described in detail.

This Edition includes:

• Assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
• Figures related to Australia's emissions from the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory.
• Assessments of conditions and trends from the National Land and Water Audit.
• Estimates of the volume of vegetation clearing and new information on wind farms.

This book is essential reading for politicians and public servants; business leaders and managers; environmentalists; academics and students in environmental courses; and all those interested in environmental issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Nov 5, 2001
• ISBN: 9780643099920

Book preview

THE CONTEXT

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CHAPTER

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1

The issues

The natural world, the living world surrounding us and of which we are part, is our source of life. We are enfolded in it. We work in it and with it. We depend upon it for all our resources. We take daily pleasure from it – from the gardens, street trees, parks and rivers and watersides within our cities and towns, from the rural countryside, from our coastlines and from the forests, wild scrublands and the remoter reaches of our land. We regularly gravitate to special parts of it in our leisure time. We respond to it and it to us. We are also changing it very greatly.

For Aboriginal people the land is their culture. ‘Country’ is intimately related to creation beliefs. While these beliefs vary between regions, their common aspect is that they describe the journeys of ancestral beings who created all the various features of the land and sea. The places known as sacred sites in the white Australian lexicon are the physical manifestations of important points on these journeys. To Aboriginal people ‘country’ means origin but ‘it is much more than a geographical space. It is a shorthand for all the values, places, resources, stories, and cultural obligations associated with that geographical area.’¹ Membership of a clan is granted at birth and is associated with hunting, fishing and gathering rights. It also entails certain responsibilities – managing the land, performing ceremonies and other such activities.

For other Australians the land in all its dimensions is part of their sense of identity. Australian painters and writers have struggled to represent its immensity, diversity, age, harshness, grandeur and special beauty. From the earliest descriptions and writings of Captain Cook and Joseph Banks and Major Robert Ross and Lieutenant Ralph Clark; of Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt; of Henry Kingsley and Joseph Furphy; of Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton, there have been widely contrasting views of the land. One has emphasised its promise and the aesthetic and material rewards offered by it; the other its deception and the hardship associated with surviving in it or wresting a life from it. Among early writers none has captured better than the explorer Ernest Giles the combination of both these responses to the land. No explorer suffered greater hardships than Giles in his crossings of Gibson’s and the Great Victoria deserts and discovered so little of apparent value. Yet Giles also had the awareness to respond to the beauties of the land.

Why nature should scatter such floral gems on such a stony sterile region it is difficult to understand but such a variety of lovely flowers of every kind and colour I have never met with previously. … In the course of my rambles I noticed a great quantity of beautiful flowers on the hills of similar kinds to those collected in the Glen of Palms, and these interested me so much that the day passed before I was aware.²

Non-indigenous Australians have been very slow to understand the characteristics of the land and plant and animal life it supports. Our current understanding has emerged from the unfolding story of the separation of the continent of Australia from Gondwana, its long physical isolation, the age of its geological features, the variability of its climate, the fragility of its soils and the extraordinary variety and delicacy of these ecosystems. Much of this knowledge and understanding is relatively new. It would no doubt amaze many of the early settlers who saw sameness and monotony everywhere that Australia is now recognised as one of the great biologically mega-diverse countries of the world. The very word ‘bush’ captures this sense of sameness. It has taken time for a language to develop that distinguishes between different plant communities and the many other distinctive categories of the Australian landscape.

Because the flora of Australia, as it has adapted and developed in response to its geological and climatic environment, has been so different from the flora of other countries, because it takes a knowledgeable or observant eye to distinguish between different ecosystems – let alone species, because even trained botanists may find it hard to distinguish between one species of eucalypt and another without detailed examination of leaf and fruit, because Australians are largely urban coastal dwellers, because Australia is for the most part a country of migrants who have brought their images of landscape from other places, for all these reasons the intellectual and emotional understanding of white Australians of the land and its flora and fauna is still adolescent and developing.

Slowly our compasses are being turned. Scientific writers such as Tim Flannery are helping Australians to understand the evolution of the land and its ecosystems. Painters such as John Wolseley are teaching us to see botanical detail, pictorial image and symbol, all at the one time. Novelists are also capturing these diverse strands of knowledge of and feeling for the land. Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus is an example.³ It is an Australian fairytale, finely told, of the squatter who promises his beautiful daughter to the man who can identify and name the full collection of eucalypts that he has planted on his property, the collection representing every species on the continent. Eucalyptus weaves together different patterns and contrasts of sensuality and practicality, purpose and futility, formal learning and intuitive knowledge, plausibility and improbability, species and ecosystems.

Awareness of Indigenous people and culture and their relationships to the land is also growing among the rest of the Australian population. For most Australians, especially city dwellers, Indigenous people have for too long been invisible or when they have been visible seen to be representative of an underclass or a distinctively different ‘other’. The most promising recent developments have not been the portraits painted of Aboriginal society by white observers, although these too are becoming richer and more subtle, but rather the way in which Aboriginal people are expressing themselves through their now world famous paintings, their music, their literature and their stories about their relationship to the land – and their protests about the loss of their land and their treatment from white society.

Drawing on Aboriginal spirituality, not to copy but rather to emulate, white Australian writers such as David Tacey are arguing that white and other migrants and settlers need to find their own spiritual relationship to the land. Tacey talks of the Australian landscape as ‘a magnificently alive archetypal presence’.⁴ Aboriginality, in the sense of a carnal and spiritual relationship to the land, is a prominent theme in writers as diverse as the philosopher Freya Mathews and the novelist David Malouf.

Damage to the land

The damage to the land wrought by the ignorance, the misconceptions and the assumptions brought from other places of the earlier settlers is now widely known. The image of a vast available space able to tolerate and absorb almost any pressures of population and development has been exposed as a misplaced fiction, although there are still some who continue to perpetuate it. The fragility of Australian ecosystems and their vulnerability to disturbance are increasingly recognised. There is still, however, a large gap in understanding of the average urban dweller.

When parts of the land that are well known to us are damaged or elements destroyed we feel a sense, sometimes a deep sense, of loss and despair. This sense of loss is an increasingly common experience. Places we have known and loved are regularly being transformed, sometimes beyond recognition. There are, however, many parts of Australia that are seriously degraded that few have knowledge of and even fewer visit. Surveys of public concern about the environment tellingly illustrate both the parochialism of perceptions of environmental problems and the lack of understanding of the processes of environmental remediation – or the lack of them – that have so far been undertaken. Regularly in national opinion polls carried out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (1992, 1994, 1996, 1998) air pollution is ranked as the environmental issue of greatest concern to Australians.⁵ Australians are right to be concerned about air pollution. It is a threat in all societies and, as Chapter 7 illustrates, there are new and emerging issues related to air pollution about which we should all be concerned. However, air pollution in local and regional airsheds is also one of Australia’s greatest environmental success stories, one of the few really significant success stories in reversing adverse environmental trends. By contrast there are other environmental problems that are worsening or not improving that are rated by informed scientific opinion as being of the greatest significance but little recognised by Australians generally. We need a better collective consciousness of the totality of the pressures on the Australian land, its plants and wildlife and the surrounding atmosphere and oceans.

The rate of environmental change is accelerating. Four powerful forces are combining to drive these changes. The first is population increase. The second is industry, commerce and development, not only to support this population growth but also to provide new goods and services for it. The third is our technological capacity, the scope and power of our machinery and our weaponry and increasingly our manipulative skills. In some parts of the world – and indeed in parts of Australia – there is a fourth force, poverty. It can be as devastating a force of environmental destruction as any of the others.

As the environment has been changed we have also become aware that the threats are of two distinctively different kinds. The first is to human health. Our air has become polluted. Our water has become tainted. Our soils have been poisoned. Sometimes the health hazards are immediate and dramatic. More often they are diffuse, not immediately identifiable, difficult to source and delayed in their impact. The second is the threat to natural abundance and biodiversity, to plants and animals and ecosystems and to the great nutrient cycles on which they depend. The perception of these two different kinds of threats also reflects changing value systems. A sole concern about human health reflects an anthropocentric value system, one that only values nature for the benefits it can provide for human beings. A concern for the protection of natural systems and other forms of life for their own sake reflects a biocentric value system, one that values nature in its own right. Recent research shows that young people, not only in Australia but also in many other parts of the world, have moved a long way towards the adoption of a biocentric value system.⁶ This offers some real promise for the future.

There is clearly great unease about these environmental changes everywhere. Environmental concern has grown remarkably from the 1970s onwards. Sometimes concern for the environment takes a back seat behind other pressing and immediate national concerns, unemployment, economic downturn, crises in health care, external threats. But the environment never takes a back seat when people are asked about their main concerns for the future.

State of the Environment reporting

Many of the environmental problems of the world relate to changes that cannot be seen, to our atmosphere through destruction of the ozone layer or through global warming, to our oceans from the pollutants being deposited in them, to water systems to soils or to vegetation and habitat loss in parts of our lands that we do not regularly visit. It is very difficult to understand what is happening to such large systems. The popular media has great difficulty in explaining the issues clearly. The problems are remote, do not have an immediate impact on people’s lives. There is no human interest component to stories about such large systems. Sometimes scientists don’t themselves know. They can only surmise.

For all these reasons efforts have increasingly been made to carry out systematic studies of environmental conditions. These studies and reviews are still in their infancy but, nevertheless, are becoming accepted as the norm in all developed countries. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council of Europe have not only asked all their member countries to carry out regular State of the Environment reports, they also have taken an active part in developing the methodologies for such reports. Some such as the OECD now carry out their own formal environmental reviews of member countries. The first review for Australia was recently carried out and published in 1998.⁷ It followed reviews in countries such as New Zealand, Canada, the US and Japan. Nearly all OECD countries have now been reviewed. Within Australia, State of the Environment reports have been prepared for the Commonwealth and at the time of writing have been or are currently being prepared for all States and Territories except Victoria. (Victoria prepared State of the Environment reports between 1985 and 1992. The role of the Environment Commissioner responsible for such reports was abolished by the Kennett Government in 1992. The Bracks Government plans to reintroduce State of the Environment reporting.) In New South Wales all local authorities are required to prepare State of the Environment reports. The quality of these reports varies greatly but it is a major step forward that the preparation of State of the Environment reports is becoming accepted practice in all political jurisdictions.

Nearly all State of the Environment reports in Australia use the OECD recommended pressure/state/response model. The reports not only attempt to describe the state or condition of the environment but also to identify the pressures that have caused or are still causing the problems and the types and adequacy of the governmental and societal responses which attempt to deal with those problems.

The development of formal, government, state of the environment reporting is much to be encouraged. It is an important step forward. However, the reports have their limitations. Some are related to the inevitable shortcomings of the first serious attempts to develop comprehensive state of the environment reporting. Some concern the scope of the exercises. The main ways in which all the reports could be extended and improved are by:

•  The development of an agreed set of shared indicators, the collection of additional key information and the preparation of proper trend analyses. Particularly we need the trend analyses. These issues are being addressed by governments across Australia. They are not problems that can be solved quickly. They also need constant critical review.

•  The further development of the OECD model. The pressure/state/response model is useful as far as it goes. It does not, however, adequately show what the implications for decision makers are and what needs to be done about key environmental problems.⁸

•  The further development of the response sections in the various reports to deal with responses in a much more systematic and meaningful way.

•  An extension of the scope of the reports. The task of those who are responsible for preparing State of the Environment reports in Australia is usually to identify the condition of the environment, what has brought it about and what has so far been done about it, not to discuss nor to propose policies and actions for dealing with key environmental problems. There is therefore a major dimension missing from nearly all reports.

The approach in this book

The rationale for this book is to take the findings of State of the Environment reports and of other similar projects to their logical conclusion. We accordingly began the book with a number of aims in mind.

It first seemed to us that the OECD pressure/state/response model, although a powerful concept, was a very cumbersome device when formally applied to theme chapter after theme chapter. It was very difficult for authors to avoid repetition. The structure, moreover, tended to obfuscate some of the core messages. One of our goals was therefore to clarify some of the messages about the condition of the environment set out in the formal reports and to deal with pressures and responses in a somewhat different way.

Second, we believed that it was important to draw out the implications of the findings about the state of the environment and therefore to try to say something about the economic and social as much as the ecological implications of a continuation of particular environmental trends.

Third, we believed that it was important to do more than describe problems. We need to say or attempt to say what we should do about them. A full review should therefore be a guide to action. This might be directly valuable for industry, universities, other institutions as well as governments but more importantly might be a stimulus for a widespread debate about the actions we need to take to deal with our own local environmental problems and to contribute effectively to the solution of the world’s.

We have not, however, abandoned the pressure/state/response model although we have been conscious of the active international debate that has been taking place about the most effective use and development of the model. Variations of the model that have been proposed internationally include the addition of ‘driving forces’ as an additional component to single out the key forces from the more general pressures and the addition of ‘impacts’ to draw out the effects of the state or trend. Nearly all international reviews also emphasise the importance of developing reporting formats that are useful to decision makers and will lead to action.

We agree that it is important to identify driving forces and we have chosen population, consumption, technology, energy use and material flows as the key driving forces. We do not think that it is possible to state with certainty what the impacts of particular conditions or trends will be but we do believe that it is possible and useful to discuss some of the implications of those trends. As discussed above, we also think that it is essential to propose what is needed to deal with environmental problems and to compare such views with what is now being done. The version of the pressure/state/response model and thus the logical structure used in this book is illustrated below.

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This structure forms the general framework for the argument in this book.

A further international criticism of the original pressure/state/response model is of its causal linearity. This problem is widely recognised in Australia. We have not specifically sought to point out in what ways there are feedback loops between the different elements in the model but the complexity of the causal relationships in real life should at all times be kept in mind.

As we worked on the book it became clear that the way some environmental problems have been conceptualised in Australia needed to be rethought, that emerging issues in international debates, especially the debate about material and energy use and flows, had been given inadequate attention in many previous Australian books and reports and needed to be given much greater prominence. We also thought it important to draw upon the most recent research rather than to rely on previous compendia and we have done that wherever we could.

Formal state of the environment reporting is an ongoing process. Progressive refinement of the formal reports could be hoped for and expected. However, it is most unlikely that any government report will tackle directly the hard questions of economic and policy change nor tell us clearly what scientific opinion thinks should be done about the many environmental issues now confronting Australian society. There is thus a need for an open investigation outside government to supplement what is being done by government.

The four pillars of sustainability

Sustainability, as it has become formally adopted around the world, has not one but three pillars: ecological sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. Some would argue that there should be four pillars and that cultural sustainability should always be included. We agree with this view. Why, it might therefore be asked, does a book which is concerned with a sustainable future for Australia concentrate so much of its attention on ecological sustainability? There are several important reasons.

First, to write a book about a sustainable future for Australia doing full and equal justice to all four pillars would be an enormous intellectual task. A proper treatment would require not one but many volumes. The alternative is a much more generalised account of the issues within a single volume. There is a place for this kind of book and there are now good examples of such books in circulation. We, however, perceived the need for a quite different kind of book which explored the issue of ecological sustainability in much greater detail.

Second, the concept of sustainable development grew from the need to combine the goals of ecological responsibility with the goal of material well-being achieved through economic development, and the parallel need to bring ecological thinking, policy and management into a comparable position with economic and social policy and management. To do this requires much more than wishing, or even stipulating, that it should happen. It requires a detailed understanding of the issues at stake, the implications of current practice and a full justification for change and intervention. Because it is manifestly clear that the environment does not now enjoy an equal status to the economy in any decision-making, media or educational sphere, without such a full justification, sustainable development will continue to mean little more than maintenance of the status quo. If Australia is to adopt a sustainable policy in the full meaning of that word, respecting fully the requirements for ecological, social and cultural as much as economic sustainability, the change will have to be toughly and tightly argued for because it challenges many well established mind-sets, structures and power relationships. This book is an argument for taking the environmental pillar seriously.

Third, if we are to achieve ecological sustainability – and it is unthinkable that we do not achieve it as quickly as possible because the alternative is untold misery for the human race as well as the destruction of the living wealth of the planet – we need to know the scientific requirements as precisely as it is possible to determine them. Once we understand the scientific requirements we can then more effectively make the social and economic adjustments and make them in ways that are most equitable and least disruptive to our overall well-being.

Both of these tasks are easier described than done. It is often very difficult to be precise about the scientific requirements because the research data is not available in full, or sometimes at all, or because the systems are so complex. But that is no excuse for failing to try. The alternative is ad hoc policy making and the reinforcement of existing prejudices and presumptions. The use of the precautionary principle is now widely accepted as the way to approach problems of this kind. Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) principles have been adopted by all governments in Australia. These principles include reference to the precautionary principle which states that ‘where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation’.⁹

It is also axiomatic that the social and economic adjustments are going to be very difficult to make since, as the United Nations Environment Programme has pointedly emphasised, environmental problems are deeply embedded in the socio-economic structures of all societies and regions. There is now compelling evidence that sustainability will require such adjustments – this book is a further argument why such adjustments are needed globally and in Australia. It is patently important to plan to make the changes needed with the best possible understanding of the scientific and technical actions required to halt environmental degradation and begin the task of environmental remediation.

There are also social risks associated with such changes. One of the most important is that environmentally related change and its impact on global and national economies will be carried out in such a way that existing injustices are not only perpetuated but exacerbated. The less the knowledge, the more that change is forced rather than planned, the more likely it is that this will happen. Surely one of the great opportunities of the structural and economic adjustments that all countries will need to make to achieve ecological sustainability is to make those adjustments in such a way that multiple social goals are achieved. One of those goals must be employment and other social opportunities for all people and reduction in inequalities within and between different societies.

For the economy there are other risks and problems in delayed responses. Industries will not be positioned to take the greatest advantage of emerging markets and new forms of employment; environmental industries are already one of the fastest growing sectors in Western economies and their growth could be stunted. The greater the level of information about the problems and the likely requirements for fixing them the better placed any society must be to deal with all of them. Timing is therefore of the greatest importance. Denying the precautionary principle, an individual nation can delay as long as possible in the hope that the problems will go away. The risks of this policy stance are very high. Accelerated changes are likely to be forced on those nations, often in adverse circumstances. Those late changes may be very difficult to make and may bring both economic and social problems of high order.

Since environmental policy cannot be looked at in an isolated way, since environmental problems are embedded in socio-economic structures and their solutions must involve those structures, we devote the last part of the book to a discussion of the relationships between ecological, economic, social and cultural issues. Here we return to the four pillars of sustainability. We had originally hoped to devote more space to this discussion. We have, however, found that the book was already growing overlong so we have confined ourselves to a sketch of these most critical issues.

Ways of knowing about the environment: Scientific,

local and community knowledge

There are very many ways of knowing about the environment. We can know about it personally and directly by being in it and through our feelings and experiences of it. This is a very powerful form of knowing. We can learn about it from the feelings, experiences and traditions of other people. In Australia there are many such bodies of knowledge available to us. Amongst the most important are the knowledge and traditions of Indigenous people. But knowledge of local conditions is not confined to Indigenous people; local residents have often been the first to identify environmental problems. We can learn from the practical experience of those whose daily work or lives are closely associated with particular environments, from farmers, foresters and those who fish. We can draw on theories of knowledge developed by prominent thinkers. From Habermas, for example, we can learn to recognise and apply different forms of technical, practical and critical knowledge.¹⁰ Each of these forms of knowledge has its place: the technical and scientific to help solve problems; the practical to help understand what is happening, to communicate with others and to initiate action; and the critical to uncover hidden implications and to challenge prevailing assumptions and processes.

Much of this book is devoted to the assessments scientists have made of the main environmental problems facing Australia and of their technical judgements about the actions needed to fix these problems. In choosing to concentrate on this form of knowing we want to emphasise that we are not suggesting that science is the only important source of environmental knowledge. All of the forms of knowing described above are important. Some are further discussed at the end of the book.

There are limitations to scientific knowledge as critics of science have pointed out. Science can be gendered; it can be culturally influenced; it can be applied for commercial, military or other interests that are inimical to ecological goals. However, international science is dealing with physical reality. It is drawing on widely accepted paradigms or assumptions. Its findings are openly and widely published, tested, challenged and replicated. There are rules for self-correction, internal consistency and for ensuring that principles do not disagree with experimental evidence. Scientific knowledge about the environment is important everywhere because there is no more objective way of knowing about the environment or of sharing that knowledge.

Scientific knowledge about the environment is particularly important in Australia. This is because of the characteristics of the environment and of settlement in Australia. First, general knowledge of the land and its ecosystems is poor in Australia because the great majority of Australians live in urban settlements located on the coastline. Some 63 per cent of Australians, for example, live in Australia’s capital cities. Even if they have the will, they have very little opportunity to observe or experience aspects of land or water degradation or biodiversity loss in the inland areas of Australia. Second, present day Australia, as Al Grassby famously observed in 1973, is a nation of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.¹¹ He would have had to reach back very many tens of thousands of years to include Indigenous people in this definition of contemporary Australia. However, the point is still an important one for the large majority of the present population. The geology, soils, ecosystems and fauna and flora of Australia are significantly different from those of the countries from which the migrants have come. It has taken a very long time for those most informed about these matters to come to understand the delicacies and vulnerabilities of these systems and the damage done to them by farming, forestry, mining, settlement, recreational and other practices based on assumptions brought from other places. It is therefore of particular importance that the scientific knowledge of the continent is better known and more widely shared and together with that knowledge that there is a better understanding of environmental problems and the actions needed to deal with them.

Another way to look at these issues is from the perspective of different discourses. We can say with certainty that the solution to environmental problems will require scientific, political, economic and community environmental discourses. The nature of each needs to be looked at separately, however much all the discourses need in the end to be brought together to achieve effective results. The scientific discourse is needed to determine the nature of the issue and the physical solution required. The political, economic and community discourses are needed to solve the problems. From this viewpoint, this book is organised so that the first and main parts concentrate on the scientific discourse and therefore draw on scientists and scientific literature. The last part of the book is devoted to an outline of the political, economic and community discourses and draws on political science, economics and social science literature. Although this part is an outline only, it is an important part of the book.

CHAPTER

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2

The physical and

global context

It is intuitively obvious that our well-being and our economy depend entirely upon the physical world around us. We rely upon it for the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. Our economies depend upon it for all their resources, the energy they use, the minerals, fibres and materials needed for natural and synthetic products and the myriad of services that are now provided to us. We also rely upon it for the absorption and recycling of our wastes and emissions. Not quite so obvious is the way that our dependence on energy and material cycles has changed in the last 150 years, the disturbances that these changes have brought about and the way the industrial economy of the world is now related to the physical world.

The evolution of life

The early atmosphere of the Earth is thought to have consisted of ammonia, methane, water vapour and other gases. Chemical reactions from sunlight and lightning are believed to have produced the amino acids which in turn led to the development of the first cells in the seas, some 3500 million years ago. The primitive bacteria were able to sustain themselves by breaking down organic compounds formed from non-biological processes. The first biological organic compounds were probably based on methane and nitrogen compounds. Gradually some of these life forms became capable of generating their own nutrients using energy from light. The development of enzymes to protect the cell from oxygen hastened the development of cells able to charge their chemical batteries from the sun to produce organic molecules and dissipate oxygen as free oxygen. The concentration of oxygen in the sea increased and gradually began to accumulate in the atmosphere. When the ozone layer in the atmosphere had increased to a sufficient thickness it was possible for living organisms to occupy the upper levels of the ocean and eventually the land masses. Ozone provides a shield to ultraviolet rays. This was crucial for the evolution of life forms because ultraviolet radiation is very destructive to them.

As plants and other life forms developed, through photosynthesis (chemical charging from the sun) the green cells were able to generate carbohydrates to build up biomass, the aggregate of plant material of the biosphere, while continuing to release free oxygen. Herbivores and carnivores evolved, feeding on plant material and other species.

Wastes from this biomass, and from animals, are today broken down by decomposers. These building blocks are then recharged through photosynthesis. Biogeochemical cycles transport the elements important to life from the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere to living things and from living things they are transported back to these spheres. All living things participate in this great material cycle.¹

The principles of conservation and the laws of

thermodynamics

The physical world, very briefly described above, is governed by laws determining the nature of flows of energy and materials. Of critical importance are the principles and laws related to matter and thermodynamics, thermodynamics being that part of physics which is concerned with conversions of energy.

The first principle is that of the conservation of mass. This principle stipulates that in material transformations the total mass of the materials used as inputs must equal the total mass of the material outputs. It tells us that matter does not disappear in material transformations. It will always be present in the same quantity, if in a different form, at the end of the cycle.

A second conservation principle tells us that each atomic element present at the beginning of a material transformation will persist in some form at the conclusion of the transformation. (In nuclear transformations individual elements may change but this has no significant bearing on the overall argument.) As an example, we rely very heavily on fossil fuels to provide the primary energy for our economy. Fossil fuels contain carbon. When fossil fuels are burnt for our industrial and personal uses some of the carbon is released into the atmosphere and combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, some is absorbed by plants and some returns to other sinks. The amount of carbon present at the beginning is the same as the amount of carbon at the end of this cycle. Before its extraction it lay in deposits in the Earth’s crust. After extraction and burning it is dissipated in different ways.

The first law of thermodynamics constitutes the third principle of conservation. This law specifies that energy like matter does not disappear during transformations. The amount of energy at the beginning of the transformation will be present at the end, albeit in a different form. Energy is neither created nor destroyed in these processes.

These three principles are fundamental to our understanding of the relationship between the economy and the physical world because they tell us that if we increase the use of energy and materials in the global economy we will increase the outputs from the economy. The outputs will always include wastes and dissipated energy.

There is a further and important law, the second law of thermodynamics. The laws of conservation and the first law of thermodynamics have been described as dealing with the quantity of energy and materials maintained during transformations. They do not, however, tell us whether these transformations can or will occur. By contrast the second law of thermodynamics is concerned with the availability of energy. It tells us that in a series of transformations the energy available for effective work progressively decreases. Eventually very little available energy is left. Energy is more and more dissipated as waste heat. Left to themselves, systems naturally degrade and become less and less ordered. To reverse this degradation would require more energy from other sources than could possibly be recovered. It is therefore useless to attempt such a recovery.

These principles of availability and lack of availability of energy are embodied in the concepts of entropy and exergy. Entropy is the measure of randomness or disorder in a physical system. Exergy is the measure of work that can be extracted from the system. Low entropy systems are ordered systems with high availability of energy. High entropy systems are disordered systems where normally little energy is available for ecosystem growth or stability. All closed systems move towards high entropy since entropy spontaneously tends to a maximum. The state of equilibrium in a closed system is the state where maximum entropy has been achieved.

If the Earth were a closed system, a system which had no external source of energy available to it, equilibrium for it would be a state where entropy had reached its maximum. It would be a state of randomness and disorder in which very little if any energy was available to life forms including humans. The Earth is not, however, a system without external sources of energy. Solar radiation provides that external source. The continuous flow of energy from the sun counterbalances the forces of entropy; reradiated low grade heat from the Earth is replaced by an incoming stream of solar energy. By this means the Earth is able to maintain an ordered system. Within this system there are complex global and local cycles such as the hydrological, carbon and other nutrient cycles.

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Figure 2.1 Global cycles

Source: Based on T. Jackson (1996). Material concerns: Pollution, profit and quality of life. Routledge, London, p. 15.

The way the equilibrium of life on the planet is maintained depends on photosynthesis. Green cells use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and other resources. These exergy-rich resources are then available to animals. The animals and the plant and animal decomposers discharge carbon dioxide, water and nutrients that can be used by the green cells and recharged as exergy-rich resources. In this way matter is cycled partly as dispersed matter and partly as exergy-rich materials. Finally, through these transformations low grade heat, high entropy energy, is dispersed into space. Most of the energy reradiated back into space as low grade heat is not, however, energy that has gone through this photochemical cycle. It is energy reradiated from the Earth and sea.

Equilibrium is maintained by one other important cycle, the cycle of materials between the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust) and the ecosphere (the living world). In pre-industrial times humans and animals drew nearly all their resources from the ecosphere. These resources were then recycled through the ecosphere. Some weathering of the Earth’s crust took place and some materials from the Earth’s crust were ejected into the ecosphere through volcanic action. These transfers of material from the Earth’s crust were, however, balanced by the return of materials to the lithosphere through sedimentation (see Figure 2.2).

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Figure 2.2 Disturbances to global cycles

During the evolution of life on the Earth there has been a progressive building up of exergy rich material in the ecosphere. By this is meant that the charging of the chemical batteries of the Earth to produce ordered energy and matter able to be used to support life has exceeded the discharge of dissipated and degraded energy into the atmosphere.

The industrial revolution: Exploiting new sources of

energy and materials

From this very simplified description of energy and material flows and the laws governing those flows we can return to the relationship between the physical world and the economy. In what way has human action and the industrial economy in the last 200 years changed the flows and the equilibrium of these systems? And does it matter?

The industrial revolution began in Britain around 1760, centred around the development of the steam engine. As is well known, the industrial revolution involved a change from small-scale, predominantly rural, cottage industries to factory-based manufacturing industries. It began in the cotton industry. Between 1760 and 1787 cotton production increased tenfold. By 1840 it had increased 150-fold. The success of the cotton industry stimulated activity in many other industries, especially the coal and the iron industries. This was the beginning of the industrial system which rapidly spread around the world. It was also the dawn of modern capitalism.²

The success of this industrial transformation significantly depended on minerals and new sources of energy. The first mineral to be extensively used in industry was iron. Iron remains today a key industrial material but many other minerals are now very widely used, bauxite (for aluminium), copper, zinc, titanium, magnesium, chromium, nickel, cadmium, mercury, to mention only a few. Non-metals such as nitrogen and phosphorus became used for fertilisers, limestone for cement and sodium chloride for chlorine. The new sources of energy were the fossil fuels, first coal and then later oil and gas. More recently other primary energy sources have been discovered and used. Fossil fuels, however, remain the main primary energy sources in most economies. If these fossil fuels had not been available the industrial revolution would not have been possible.

Both minerals and fossil fuels are non-renewable resources. They are thus finite resources which once dissipated or burnt cannot be recreated, except in the instance of fossil fuels over very long periods of time. The minerals can, however, be recycled. Both minerals and fossil fuels are extracted from the Earth’s crust. (Magnesium and sodium chloride are extracted from the sea.) They have other important characteristics. Some minerals, such as iron and bauxite are already present in large quantities in the ecosphere. Others such as cadmium and mercury are present in only very small quantities. Many of those, including cadmium and mercury, which are present in only small quantities in the ecosphere are highly toxic to life forms.

The fossil fuels are the fossilised remains of biomass (organic matter derived from living organisms). They constitute very important sources of low entropy and thus available energy. In the pre-industrial thermodynamic system, as illustrated in Figure 2.1, the energy available to human beings was largely limited to the energy flowing from solar radiation and transformed through photosynthesis into exergy-rich foodstuffs and fibres, although it was supplemented from some other sources. Humans used the energy of animals, horses, bullocks, donkeys, for their purposes. They learnt how to use fire and burnt wood, peat and some coal. Virtually all these supplementary sources of energy were, however, derived from renewable resources and changed relatively little the total amount of end-use energy associated with human activities. The use of fire probably doubled the somatic energy, the bodily energy, derived by humans from food and used to sustain human life. By contrast the amount of energy used by an average person in a developed country today has increased 50 times or more beyond somatic energy use.

Energy and material flows in Australia and the world are discussed in greater detail in Chapters 4 and 5.

The limits to growth:The right argument for the

wrong reason?

Does it matter that we have altered the flows of energy and materials in the way described above. It might matter for two main reasons. They are:

1 the dependence of the industrialised economies on non-renewable and thus potentially scarce resources which might soon become exhausted; and

2 disturbance of the equilibrium of the pre-industrial thermodynamic global system.

These two possible problems therefore need to be examined carefully.

Limits to resources is a well-known argument. It was given its most dramatic contemporary emphasis in The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by Meadows, Meadows, Behrens and Randers. The Limits to Growth was a study carried out for the Club of Rome by systems analysts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.³ Meadows et al. modelled a number of key aggregates (resources, population, industrial output, food supply and pollution) and variables. The conclusion reached by the research team was that, given the postulates and assumptions, some limit would be reached within 100 years which would lead to the collapse of the industrial system and its capacity to support the population of the world.

These arguments were challenged from many quarters. Critics immediately pointed out that the key aggregates examined did not include technology and prices. Technology would, it was claimed, help us to discover additional resources at economic prices and to find alternatives to existing processes and use of resources when they were needed. Prices would provide the signals and drive the needed changes either to find new resources or substitutes for them. The prices of key resources, it was further argued, were not rising and were unlikely to rise in the future, demonstrating that there was not a resource crisis. Julian Simon, an economist, took up this last argument with special zeal. In a famous wager he bet the ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1980 that the real price of any natural resource Ehrlich might like to nominate would be lower at anytime in the future Ehrlich might like to specify. Ehrlich chose a ten-year period and copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten as the resources. At the conclusion of the period all prices of the commodities nominated had dropped in real price by margins ranging from 8 to 78 per cent.⁴

If we continue to use non-renewable resources at the rate at which they are now being used, it is self-evident that in time we will run out of those resources. Simon’s argument, however, shows that this time may be a lot further away than is immediately apparent. We are constantly adding to what is called the economic demonstrated resources, that is to resources that can be mined or tapped at economically justifiable prices. In addition, there are supplementary resources that could be used if prices show any tendency to rise or technology improves. We are also constantly developing new technologies which offer alternatives to the use of potentially scarce resources. The time available for the substitution of the new for the old technologies in our economies could be a great deal longer than the doomsday prophesiers predict.

Crude oil is a resource widely used today that many predict will become a scarce resource during the 21st century. It is, however, possible that we will find new fields somewhere across the globe. It is also possible that we will find new technologies for the exploitation of other oil sources such as oil shale. Even if new sources do not materialise at the level we would need, does it matter? It will matter in the sense that the world will have to find alternative energy sources especially for transport. It is likely that some of the adjustments may be difficult. But it may not matter in other ways. It is a plausible argument that there will be time for human ingenuity, new technology and the price signals given to the economy, as a resource such as oil starts to become scarce, to drive societies to find satisfactory alternatives.

Scarcity of specific resources does not therefore have to mean limits to growth. There are, however, two important arguments against such a careless use of scarce resources. The first is that depletion of the living resources of the planet is potentially a very serious problem not because of any immediate problems it may pose for the global economy but because of the possibility of major disruptions to global cycles on which all of life depends. The second is a moral one. Do we have the right to deprive future generations of the use of a resource that has been very beneficial to ourselves? The technological substitution argument may not in all respects be correct. We may be imposing significant restrictions on future generations that we have not sought to impose on ourselves.

Disturbances to the system

The main problem on which we need to concentrate is the disturbance of the equilibrium of the Earth’s thermodynamic system and the material cycles on which life depends.

Increases in entropy disturb the order in Earth’s system in potentially very serious ways. The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was one of the first to draw out the relationship between the laws of thermodynamics and the economy and to point to the potential economic and social problems of the disturbance to the thermodynamic order of global systems. Since publication of The Entropy Law and the Economic Process in 1971,⁵ these concerns have increasingly occupied the attention of ecological economists as much as natural scientists.

Disturbances can be clearly seen in the biogeochemical cycles, the term describing the way chemical elements cycle through living organisms, the atmosphere and the Earth’s crust. Although close to a third of the 91 elements existing naturally on Earth are needed by living things, six elements are of particular significance because they are required in large quantities. These elements are carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (0), nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and sulfur (S). Carbon and water (combining hydrogen and oxygen) are the main components of living things; carbohydrates are, for example, organic compounds made from these three elements. Proteins and nucleic acids needed for growth and development of living things require the other elements.

The nutrients flow between reservoirs. The most important of these reservoirs are life forms (both the living and the dead), the soil, water bodies, the atmosphere and the lithosphere. The reservoirs can be further classified into three groups:

1 bio-unavailable reservoirs that store nutrients that are not available to living things without prior chemical transformations;

2 nutrient reservoirs which store nutrients that are directly available to plants and animals; and

3 reservoirs of life forms, living or dead.

Ayres, Schlesinger and Socolow argue that in their pre-industrial state the flows were constant but balanced each other.⁶ Today none of the grand nutrient cycles is in a steady state. As one example only, ‘nitrate deposition rates in Greenland were nearly constant for 200 years, until about 1950, and have roughly doubled since then.’⁷ A brief description of the ways in which the reservoirs and flows of the six main elements discussed above have been altered by human activity follows.

Carbon is found and is recycled through the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust), the soil, water, the atmosphere and living things. Carbon is stored in the Earth’s crust in two main ways, as hydrocarbons, material formed from dead organisms, mainly plants, and as carbonate attached to other elements such as calcium, sodium and magnesium. In natural, undisturbed systems, carbon cycles through the soils, atmosphere, water and living things relatively quickly. By contrast, carbon stored in the lithosphere cycles very slowly, mainly released by volcanic action. By extracting and burning fossil fuels extracted from the lithosphere, humans have significantly affected carbon flows. Especially significant have been the increases of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, the concentrations of these and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the consequent greenhouse effect.

The hydrologic cycle is the movement of water on and around the surface of Earth driven by energy from the sun and by gravity. The two main processes in the hydrologic cycle are evapotranspiration (evaporation and transpiration) and precipitation. Evaporation is the